A FOCUS ON THE CULTURAL TRANSITION AND IDENTITY OF WOMAN CHARACTER’S IN THE NOVEL‘THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER’ BY AMY TAN’

Abstract

“The Bonesetter’s Daughter” is the third novel of Amy Tan. Focusing on the cultural
transition and barriers, the story tells us as to how the special woman charater, Gu Lin Xin’s
ghost helps to guide Luling, her daughter and Ruth’s mother, out of the hazardous situations in
China.
The novel focuses the women characters from Chinese or Chinese-American
backgrounds. Flashing back to her innocent childhood and adolescence, Ruth comes to realize
that the mother-daughter relation is rooted in her identity crisis living as both American and
Chinese; her Chinese mother’s silence and frustrations of living in a foreign country, and the
miscommunication between her mother and herself. More important, is as Luling is losing her
memory, Ruth recovers her mother’s autobiography that is the representation of her mother’s
past memories written in back to the present America, where Ruth resumes the role as a story
teller, where she confines the change in culture feeling her mother...
“ I am an American, Ruth shouted. I have a right to privacy to pursue my own happiness,
not yours!”. (BSD 34)
As Ruth is a ghost- writer, she reads and edits various books. While Luling her mother
gives her, her manuscripts written in Chinese and also her mother’s, Precious Auntie’s
manuscripts. Coming to Precious Auntie’s character, she undergoes a cultural transition from
being born as a girl but she evolves into a responsible son as her father does not bind her legs, as
foot binding is a tradition followed in China. Precious Auntie in the only child of her parents, she
changes from a traditional Chinese woman to an dependent woman. She refused to have her feet
bounded and learn to be an independent woman.
“.... Let me do whatever a son might do. I learned to read and write, to ask question, to
play riddles, to write eight legged poems to walk alone and admire nature”.